I have a hard time wrapping my head around that number. Nearly five thousand “apps”. Near as I can tell, it’s a solid 2% of the whole App Store. With an (optimistic) 5-day-per-app approval time, it would take Apple 86 years to approve them serially.

But yeah, it would be a heck of a lot easier to defend their role as the final arbiter of quality on the platform if there weren’t a flood of garbage apps being approved every day. For every great app that gets rejected on a tiny HIG technicality, there’s a dozen that barely function and look like they were designed in MSPaint.